5-18-68: santa clara county fairgrounds.

if you want to hear what the grateful dead sounded like six months prior to the release of live dead and the lauded 1969 line-up, this jorma kaukonen field tape is a telling record of the band’s hard-driving, opulently psychedelic 1968 soundscape. with two-thirds of the ’68 shows lost and many of the surviving documents being incomplete, this one is a real find. a caveat regarding the sound quality: the onstage microphone set-up swims quite a bit, has a number of drop-outs, and contains almost no up front vocals in the mix. despite these obvious liabilities, the music is breathtaking from start to finish. in fact, if pressed to produce a recording that perfectly documents the raging power of the grateful dead’s nineteen sixty-eight feverish, improvisatory gestalt, i strongly believe that the santa clara performance should always be in the conversation.

the american music journalist greil marcus was in attendance for the dead’s matinee outing. he remembers tom “big daddy” donahue introducing the band, announcing that their new album would be out that week, and suggesting that the dead might play some numbers from it during their set. marcus wrote: “jerry garcia smiled benignly to himself. he said they'd do 'alligator' and they did, for about forty minutes. that was their set and it blew the place wide open.”

listening to the swelling, monstrous, and brutal groove of this performance, i’d have to agree.
https://archive.org/details/gd1968-05-18.aud.jorma.gmb.sbeok.94591.flac16